Posted by Malcolm on 25th Oct 2019
Healthy horse - Safe young rider
My 7 year old son Curtis rides "Creamy", a 14 yr old quarter horse who suffers a long term injury and arthritis. Mobility for Creamy is an ongoing issue but he is a one in a million horse with an extraordinary nature and loads of heart and capability.
Last October, we turned Creamy out for a spell on river pastures (high oxalate, predominately buffel) for around 6 weeks.
When we brought him back in, his behaviour had radically changed. He was difficult to catch, reluctant to work and began bucking and rearing all the time.
The behaviour became worse as time went on and by May this year he was being very difficult - our confidence in him to look after our seven year old was at an all time low.
I was treating a mare with BREAK FREE and thought Creamy could possibly benefit from the same supplement. I fed him on the loading dose for 2 months, then weaned back to the maintenance dose. After the first 2-3 weeks of treatment, our champion was back! (PLEASE READ NOTE BELOW)
Creamy has been totally reformed by BREAK FREE and is back to his usual kind personality. He and Curtis are back winning campdrafts and gymkhanas all over the place!!
I would highly recommend this product to anyone combating high oxalate
issues.
Toni Gray
Curtis' mum
PS
My mare is going well. She was much more affected by hypocalcaemia, to a critical point, so her response has been more gradual. She is currently recovering, so not in work at the moment.
I have now moved over to the lick and have all my horses on it. Love it!
Thank you and Cheers
Toni.
We would hate you to think that BREAK FREE cures Big Head in 2-3 weeks. This pony had only been on high oxalate pasture for 6 weeks. Any bone demineralisation would have been limited at that stage and he had no Big Head symptoms. What he had were the classic soft tissue symptoms of poorly functioning brain, muscles, tendons etc.
His case highlights that the traditional theory that horses become calcium deficient when fed oxalates is inadequate. The body fluids would still have had perfectly normal blood calcium levels as the bones would have been giving up calcium to ensure that happened. That is natures system. So the soft tissues would still have been bathed in "normal" fluids (as our and other blood tests confirm). So why the obvious symptoms?
Our theory is that horses like Creamy become chelated calcium deficient and that chelated calcium has a role in cellular function all over the body. Creamy's symptoms were those failures showing up in the brain, muscles tendons etc etc. The classic oxalate poisoning symptoms that the "calcium deficiency theory" doesn't explain.
So if your horse has been exposed to oxalates for much longer than Creamy please don't take the soft tissue improvements as an indication that the bones have remineralised. Our trial work shows that we can stop bone de-mineralisation quite quickly (we have measured levels of the hormone PTH that controls that). But we have no way of knowing when bones have recovered well enough to return a chronic case to work.